Liquid crystal displays were first used as displays of notebook personal computers, and currently, they are used as displays of desktop personal computers, portable phones, and the like. Further, in addition to these, in recent years, the liquid crystal displays have been applied to liquid crystal TVs. However, TN (Twisted Nematic) liquid crystal mode commonly used at the present time has many problems associated with moving image display performance for TV uses in terms of a viewing angle, a response speed, and the like.
Accordingly, in recent years, tremendous study effort has been directed toward an OCB (Optically self-Compensated Birefringence) liquid crystal mode as a liquid crystal mode which would take the place of the TN liquid crystal mode. In contrast with the TN liquid crystal mode, the OCB liquid crystal mode could be more suitable for display of a moving image because of its wide viewing angle and fast response. It should be noted that the OCB liquid crystal mode needs to be specially driven before displaying an image. To be specific, in the OCB liquid crystal mode, there are a bend alignment capable of image display (see FIGS. 2(b), 2(c)), and a splay alignment incapable of image display (see FIG. 2(a)). In order to cause the OCB liquid crystal in the splay alignment to transition to the bend alignment (hereinafter this phenomenon is referred to as transition), there is a need for special drive, e.g., application of a high voltage (e.g., about 25V) to a liquid crystal layer during a given time. It should be appreciated that the drive associated with transition is irrelevant to the present invention, and a detailed description will not be further given.
However, the OCB liquid crystal involves a problem of occurrence of a phenomenon (hereinafter referred to as backward transition) in which it cannot maintain the bend alignment and returns to the splay alignment under the condition in which a voltage with a certain level or higher (e.g., about 2.1V) is not applied to the liquid crystal layer for a certain time after it has transitioned from the splay alignment to the bend alignment.
At present, it is only the OCB liquid crystal mode that is adapted to transition to the alignment state different from that in the non-display state (no-voltage application state), and therefore, such a problem arises only in the OCB liquid crystal mode. In the future, if liquid crystal modes adapted to transition to the alignment state different from that in the non-display state for conducting display are developed, then the similar problems would arise in such liquid crystal modes.